William Gilbert's (1544-1603) natural philosophy was an early conceptual framework for an alternate science of motion.Gilbert was able to make sense of "action-at-a-distance" because he was willing to explore and use concepts which did not fit within the science of motion known as mechanics.
However, the early proponents of the mechanical philosophy (e.g. Descartes, Huygens and others) did not like it and their opinions were highly influential. Harry http://www.new-science-theory.com/william-gilbert.html quote: "When science proper was first developing in Europe, the prevailing scholarly philosophy of nature was that of Aristotle backed by governments and religion. In Aristotle's divine universe every thing was to some extent self-acting (or 'animate') and thinking with divinely set motivations and knowledge - so that objects fell to the ground because they sought to move themselves 'to their natural place'. Gilbert saw this as involving too much irrational supposition and unable to describe the complex realities of actual natural phenomena shown in experiments to accord with invariant laws of behaviour. Gilberts theory did retain Aristotle's self-action for bodies, but only as automatic invariant law responses to emitted signals - so stones fell to the ground only with a specific acceleration in response to a specific strength and direction of gravity signals from the Earth. Gilbert postulated a robot signal- response universe basically, and saw that as very different to the Aris totle divine universe though it did retain one element of it."
